I know what you are asking, what exactly is Adobe Lightroom and why do I need it? You probably already have Photoshop anyway. Well you don't need it! You can continue to keep your photos organized on your hard drive in the equivalent of an electronic shoe box and when you need to find that perfect shot, you can probably find it in less time that it takes to change the oil in your car.
What I am saying is this: if you take a lot of pictures, especially in raw format, you are going to find that you really do need Adobe Lightroom. It's not a copy of some of the current digital asset management (DAM) programs such as iViewMedia or Aperture, rather Adobe has quietly thrown down the gauntlet and has said that it is going to take over the whole DAM business and has shown us how it should be done.
Of the big guns, Apple was first with Aperture and now Adobe with Lightroom. It is my opinion that Adobe holds the upper hand. This is not an attempt to catch up to Apple either; I feel that Adobe has been sitting back creating the superior product.
Within Adobe Lightroom there are five main areas: Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print and Web and they are laid out for easy navigation throughout the system. If you are familiar with Photoshop, you will feel right at home with Lightroom. One of the great features of the overall interface is the freedom you have with the workspace. You can hide things quickly all the way to "Lights Out" mode where you can, with a tap of the "L" key, change your screen to a dim view and with another tap, only the photo will show.
The library is the area that you use to import your images. This creates a record of each image. The record, as well as a preview, is stored in a database. This records where the photo is stored, the metadata that describes the photo, and the editing instructions that are performed from within the develop module. The database lets you perform tasks on the photos such as applying ratings, adding additional metadata, adding keyword tags, organizing them into collections and removing anything unwanted. You can view your images in grid, loupe, compare and survey views.
Article comments
1 - Howard Dratch
Total agreement. It works well even though I am still using all my film-based Nikons and import digital files from flat-bed and film scanners or have the local (non-professional) lab make a CD.
The web galleries are slick and easy to create. Now I just have to finish making my own web page(s) and pay for a host -- partly because Blogger does a lot of things really well but showing pictures is not one of them.
It is good to have more well-written photography-related articles here on Blogcritics. Thanks.
2 - T. Michael Testi
Thanks Howard for the kind words. When I first heard about it, it sparked my interest but I really did not think that I needed it. Once I started working with it, I was amazed that made my life so much easier.
It is good to have more well-written photography-related articles here on Blogcritics.
That is my hope to generate more articles with a photography slant within "The Enlightened Image"
T.
3 - Jay
I've been playing with Lightroom for a few days now and I watched Chris Orwig's Lynda tutorials and liked them a lot for a quick startup with Lightroom. I understand that the exported pdf does not save the music you've selected when you create a slideshow but can anyone tell me if you can save to the Web with music? Can't find an easy way to do it.
Lightroom itself doesn't seem to allow this, just wondering if that's correct and if anyone knows an easy way to make a music file play when my slideshow starts on the Web.
Thanks,
Jay Levan
4 - Mahesh Shantaram
All those who claim that Adobe created a superior product forget to mention a little-known fact that they actually bought Raw Shooter Premium and only built the bells and whistles around it. Seriously, RSP was so much slicker, but hey, now Lightroom lets me create web albums to share pics with family and friends :-|
5 - clvrmnky
Lightroom was a complete design-and-build from the ground up. Stealing good ideas from RSP was probably a good idea, but Lightroom is a completely different code-base and shares no code with RSP.